A strong autobiography recounts one woman’s road to spiritual enlightenment.
In this debut memoir, a psychologist shares the wisdom she received by opening her mind.
Sanderson is no stranger to the concepts of self-awareness and spirituality. As a psychologist who helps others cope during crisis situations and discover meaning in the most intense human experiences, she deftly writes about the mind’s often complex routes to finding inner fulfillment, peace, and enlightenment. This work is unusual in the way that it honestly shares a woman’s path to becoming a “medium” of sorts, tapping into the messages being distributed by energy sources around her. The author is open from the beginning about the shocking and uncomfortable nature of this transition, and invites readers to travel from the practical and research-based realm to the nonmaterial world of energy exchange. Sanderson repeatedly refers to “PoE,” which means “point of existence.” This idea involves using the heart to perceive events rather than simply employing the senses. For example, in a discussion of music, the author writes: “If humans would allow the music to flow through the heart centers, there would be a shift to a state of expanded awareness, which would allow for a fuller, richer experience than what the sense of hearing allows. The music carries the listener to a realm of expanded awareness where the energy of love allows emotional reactions to certain pieces of music.” This notion appears throughout the book, encouraging readers to draw on the heart to clear the mind’s “chatter” and embrace the world rather than simply relying on hearing, seeing, tasting, etc. Perhaps Sanderson’s greatest strength here is taking topics that might feel difficult for some readers to grasp—such as expanded awareness—and making them feel comfortable, accessible, intriguing, and engaging. The book will likely speak to those ready to take leaps of faith in their own odysseys to the unknown, tapping into new senses and experiences that question their past perceptions and limitations. If nothing else, readers should be inspired by the author’s bravery and candor in revealing the riveting details of her journey.
A strong autobiography recounts one woman’s road to spiritual enlightenment.Pub Date: June 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9996427-0-2
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Clark Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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